Symbolism

The symbolists refuse to name things: they prefer to suggest them, and to make poetry a music before it is a meaning. Mallarmé wrote that one should paint not the thing but the effect it produces; Verlaine called for music above all else; Rimbaud gave each vowel a colour. The movement starts in the Paris of the 1880s, in cafés and small reviews, with Baudelaire as common ancestor. It quickly reached Vienna, Brussels and Spanish America, where Rubén Darío drew modernismo from it, and it leads straight to the poetry of the twentieth century.

works 7

• PoetryThe Flowers of EvilLes Fleurs du malCharles Baudelaire · 1857One hundred poems in which the poet moves from the ideal to spleen, from wine to revolt and to death.LiteraturePublic domain
• PoetryPoems Under SaturnPoëmes saturniensPaul Verlaine · 1866The first collection of a twenty-two-year-old poet, doomed to melancholy by a dark planet.LiteraturePublic domain
• PoetryA Season in HellUne saison en enferArthur Rimbaud · 1873A prose interspersed with verse in which a young poet puts his own poetry on trial.LiteraturePublic domain
• TaleAzul…Rubén Darío · 1888not translated into EnglishTales and verse written in Chile by a young journalist from Central America, in which he speaks of the artist's condition in a society ruled by money.Literature
• EssayDivagationsStéphane Mallarmé · 1897Short prose pieces, criticism and theory, gathered in a single volume that the author said had no architecture.LiteraturePublic domain
• TheatreThe Blue BirdL'Oiseau bleuMaurice Maeterlinck · 1908On a Christmas Eve, two woodcutter's children set out to find the bird of happiness through enchanted lands.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelThe Notebooks of Malte Laurids BriggeDie Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids BriggeRainer Maria Rilke · 1910The notebooks of a young Dane alone in Paris, where jottings from the street and memories of childhood answer one another without order.LiteraturePublic domain